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Do you eat mindlessly because you're in pain or bored? Geneen Roth shares 10 more conversation starters to realize what you're putting in your mouth.

By Geneen Roth

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I don't believe in "inner children." I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves—undigested pockets of pain—that need to be recognized and welcomed so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.

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The most radical part of my own story is not that I stopped dieting; it's that I stopped trying to fix myself. I stopped fighting with myself...stopped blaming myself, my mother, my latest boyfriend for my weight. And since diets were my most flagrant attempt at fixing myself, I stopped them as well.

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Compulsive eating is a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard.

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Come back. Break the trance. Pay attention to your breath. Your arms. Your legs. Wake up to the riot of life around you every second.

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Until you understand who you take yourself to be, true change is not possible.

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The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value and possibility. To change your body, you must first understand what is shaping it.

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Being with feelings is not the same as drowning in them.

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Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds—our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief—that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

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I tell my students they need to remember two things: Eat what they want when they're hungry and feel what they feel when they're not.

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Spiritual hunger can never be solved on the physical level.

Have a question for Geneen about your food obsessions? Ask her now!

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Published 06/21/2010